Printed documents have been a primary source of communication for many centuries. It has been used widely across different domains such as in news reporting, advertising, office environments (large and small offices alike) and so on. The last decade has witnessed an explosion in popularity of mobile hand-held devices such as smart phones and more recently tablet and wearable devices. The ubiquitous nature of print media and ever increasing popularity of hand-held and wearable devices have led to a new genre of applications based on augmented reality.
Augmented reality (or “AR” in short) is a view of a physical world where some elements of physical reality are augmented by computer generated inputs such as sound, graphics and so on. Users are able to use such hand-held and wearable devices to retrieve additional information related to a captured image of a real world object from a camera connected to the device (e.g. a camera phone or a camera attached to a head-mounted display or AR glasses) and augment the additional information to the real world object. Such a real-world object may be a natural image in a document, a piece of textual information, a physical object such as a printer and so on.
In addition to hand-held devices, projectors are also being used to show augmented reality information, especially in an office environment. For example, projectors, in conjunction with a camera, are being used to provide an augmented reality system. A projection based augmented reality system provides hands-free and glasses-free augmented reality to the end-user.
A need exists to ensure that a projection based augmented reality system provides a fulfilling experience to a user regardless of limitations posed by an environment in which the system is being used.